Kevin Gordon – Down to the Well

Have you ever driven on a lazy afternoon down some asphalt-cracked state route and gone through an aging, run-down town? Then you’ve lived a Kevin Gordon song. It’s a place where “mud colored dogs [are] guarding shotgun shacks” and a “black crow [is] pecking at a roadkill coon.”

It makes sense, then, that Gordon duets with Lucinda Williams on the title track. Both musicians write evocative tales of small-town Southern life. While not yet in Williams’ league, Gordon conveys a strong sense of people and places. Sometimes his songs are drawn in a realistic manner — as with the Louisiana-based, creosote-soaked “Oil City Girl” — and sometimes they’re more impressionistic. In “Jimmy Reed Is The King Of Rock N’ Roll”, he uses just a few images (“Dark sunglasses, shark skin suit/Standing in the broken glass of East Dubuque”) to create a powerful portrait. In either vein, however, Gordon’s songs project a genuine lived-in quality.

On Down To The Well, Gordon also displays musical growth over his previous effort, Cadillac Jack’s #1 Son. While that record fit in the muscular singer-songwriter mode of vintage Zevon and Springsteen, Gordon, whose vocals occasionally recall John Hiatt, here injects more Southern bluesiness into his roadhouse roots-rock. With the aid of his fellow producers (and also guitarists on the album) Bo Ramsey and Joe McMahan, Gordon gives this impressive disc a down-home soulfulness appropriate for his world of drifters and broken men, alcohol and doused dreams.